When Last I Died

"Well," said Muriel, rising with the guest, "won't you stay and have a cup of tea or something? I'm sure it's been really nice to have a chat with somebody about it. But nothing can bring Tom back. Still, it's very kind of you to take an interest. I am ever so glad you called."

Mrs. Bradley was glad, too. Dimly she was beginning to see quite a number of things, all of them interesting; some astonishingly so.

Chapter Five

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

"Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie."

RALEIGH.

MRS. BRADLEY'S application for permission to hold séances in the house at which Cousin Tom had met his death was granted by Miss Foxley, and the séances were duly held. They were not conducted by Mrs. Bradley, although she was an interested participant.

She went twice to the house before the first séance, and contrived to dispense with the services of the caretaker as guide.

"Just as you like, mum," he said, when she pointed out that his voice and familiar tread did not give the spirits, if there were any, a chance, "although I didn't think, when I first had the pleasure of showing you round, as you was one of them fakers."

"One of those what?" said Mrs. Bradley.

"Well, you've heard of poodle-fakers, haven't you? I calls these here ghost-hunters spirit-fakers."

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Bradley. "A spirit-faker, in the full technical sense of the term, is a person who fakes, or manufactures, spirits for the purpose of deceiving the earnest seeker after psychical phenomena."

"Oh, ah," said the old man, deflated. He handed her the keys. "No good me telling you which is for which door. You'd never remember 'em all," he continued. Mrs. Bradley accepted the formidable bunch.

"I shall proceed according to the method of trial and error," she said. Lugubriously the old man watched her approach the drawing-room, and then he shuffled away to his dinner.

Mrs. Bradley had chosen her time carefully. She had discovered the hour at which the custodian dined, and the average amount of time he spent over his meal. She knew that she had approximately two hours at her disposal. It was her intention to make a thorough examination of the house and to repeat this examination, if she thought it necessary, once more before the first séance was held. She had arranged that this séance should be held after dark, and had rented the house for the twenty-four hours beginning at ten in the morning.

She did not go into the drawing-room until the caretaker was out of sight. Then she unlocked it and went straight across to the window. It was in front of this window that the body of Cousin Tom must have fallen. Taking a folding ruler from her skirt-pocket, she measured the height of the room. She had already formed a mental estimate of the height of the bedroom window-sill from the ground, and her measurements showed the drawing-room ceiling to be twelve feet high.

She wanted to go upstairs and measure the height of the bedroom from which Cousin Tom had fallen, and prove to her own satisfaction that, allowing for flooring, there was no secret cavity between the rooms. She was trying to account for the poltergeist.

If, as she supposed, the phenomena were not genuine, then it was necessary to discover some hiding place from which the perpetrator of what had turned out to be a very grim joke could have emerged and to which he could have returned whilst 'haunting' the house.

There was the possibility, of course, that the phenomena might be genuine, and this point she did not overlook. Nevertheless, in as much of the literature relating to poltergeist activity as she had been able to procure, there seemed no evidence of anything beyond mischief and a certain amount of childish spite behind the poltergeist manifestations. Murder, for instance, seemed quite outside the scope of poltergeist behaviourism, and she had not the slightest hesitation in accepting, as a working hypothesis, Mrs. Muriel Turney's conviction that Cousin Tom had met with foul play.

The house itself, as she had realised upon her first visit and in spite of the somewhat irritating presence of the old man, was a most extraordinary place. Stone-built in the most hideous and uncompromising style of the middle of the nineteenth century, it retained evidence of having been erected on the site of a very much older building, for in some respects it adhered to the Elizabethan ground-plan upon which an earlier house had been built.

Of all the picturesque features of its foundation, however, it retained nothing but some panelling by the side of an obviously reconstructed fireplace in the dining-room.